04/23/2015

To the radical egalitarian, the civilization that we live in is horribly unjust. The power laws that manifest themselves in the distribution of wealth lead to the very few owning the vast majority. Worse than that inequality of ownership is the inequality of opportunity that accompanies it, with the vast majority chained to menial labor lest they fall into grinding poverty. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau lamented in The Social Contract: “Man is born free and he is everywhere in chains.” A powerful, stirring accusation no doubt, and one that cuts to the heart of the radical egalitarian uneasiness with, really, all political order.

In the book that followed, Rousseau argued that the only way for human beings to live freely, or even as proper human beings since man was free by definition for Rousseau, was for each person to freely give themselves to the general will: “each, by giving himself to all, gives himself to no one, and since there is no associate over whom one does not acquire the same right as one grants over oneself, one gains the equivalent of all one loses, and more force to preserve what one has” (Rousseau 1997: 50). Rousseau’s condemnation of the hierarchies of 18th century Europe helped to motivate a trend of political thinking that fought against such institutions in the centuries to follow, beyond the feudal ancien régime to the liberal commercial society.

One of the essential features of the radical egalitarian outlook that Rousseau helped to promote is that each person in a society should relate and sympathize with the fellow members of her society as an equal. In such a society, everybody is united with each other in cooperation encompassing the entire community. Rousseau wrote of such a society in The Social Contract, “As soon as this multitude is united in one body, one cannot injure on of the members without attacking the body, and still less can one injure the body without the members being affected” (Ibid: 52). The egalitarian society is, therefore, one in which everybody within it pulls together for the common good.

Only through that act of encompassing cooperation could people interact with each other as equals. Much like hoplites in formation, their total dedication to the community ensured that no one person could stake out a position above his fellow citizens. However, once people began to look after their own interests, the solidarity of primordial society decayed, which Rousseau recognizes in his Second Discourse: “This is how natural inequality imperceptibly unfolds together with unequal associations, and the differences between men, developed by their different circumstances, become more perceptible, more permanent in their effects, and begin to exercise a corresponding influence on the fate of individuals” (Rousseau 1997: 170).

It’s a tempting vision that appeals to the innate human yearning for encompassing cooperation and meaning through such cooperation. But it’s one that’s irreconcilable with the hierarchical nature of a complex society. The reason is that egalitarianism stems from our innate yearning for an egalitarian society that was selected for over the hundreds of thousands of years that our distant ancestors once lived in.

Radical egalitarianism has become apart of social democracy’s civil religion. To speak against it is an act of heresy, yet radical egalitarianism is a very dangerous doctrine that stands juxtaposed to the demands of the civilization whose fruits we enjoy. When a radical egalitarian sees a world in chains, a more sober perspective recognizes the necessary hierarchy to sustain that has sustained civilization across the millennia. Put into practice, in its indiscriminate leveling of hierarchy, radical egalitarianism seeks to destroy the social complexity that has made social existence possible in complex societies.

It isn’t an accident that radical egalitarianism is an advocate for a type of society resembling the ancestral bands that Homo sapiens evolved within. At its heart, radical egalitarianism is an expression of humanity’s yearning for such a society. Human beings aren’t simply souls in machines; rather, they are animals whose social aptitudes have evolved over a vast natural history that should be the subject of greater appreciation in the study of human society. To understand man as a political animal, one has to understand man as a band animal; in the words of Daniel Klein, one has to understand band-man and his legacy around us. Apart of the legacy of the band is a desire for an egalitarian community and cooperation that encompasses across that entire community.

In Guns, Germs, and Steel, one of Jared Diamond’s general argument is that civilization put to an end the egalitarian status that people had once enjoyed in their ancestors’ bands. The sympathy that motivates people’s desire for a fair society and the moral sentiments that lead us to approve of the leveling of hierarchy evolved in the unique context of the ancestral bands our Paleolithic ancestors resided in. In those bands, people generally relate and sympathize with each others as equals. However, as complex society emerged, people could no longer relate to each others as equals as hierarchies dissolved the primordial solidarity of the ancestral band.

With the mutation of the first chiefdoms, human societies across the world began an unstoppable evolution towards ever more unequal and ever more kleptocratic societies:

By now, it should be obvious that chiefdoms introduced the dilemma fundamental to all centrally governed, nonegalitarian societies. At best, they do good by providing expensive services impossible to contract for on an individual basis. At worst, they function unabashedly as kleptocracies, transferring net wealth from commoners to upper classes. These noble and selfish functions are inextricably linked, although some governments emphasize much more of than function that of the other. (Diamond 2005: 276)

With civilization, wealth and political power was now inequality distributed across the population, often with a very high correlation between the two. Moreover, that unequal distribution was a feature, not a bug.

After all, any complex system is going to be hierarchical to some degree. As Herbert Simon argued in “The Architecture of Complexity,” hierarchy is to some degree a measurement of complexity. Although Diamond is woefully ignorant about the role that commerce has played in the rise of civilization—a quick perusal through the index of Guns, Germs, and Steel reveals that neither ‘commerce,’ ‘property’ nor ‘trade’ make an appearance there—his broad strokes demonstrate how civilization has become progressively ever less egalitarian. Whatever one may think about Diamond’s larger argument about civilization, his diagnosis of all complex societies as kleptocracies to one degree or another should be heeded. Whether its Babylon, the Egypt of the Middle Kingdom, Antonine Rome, Plantagenet England, or Imperial Germany, few will hold mastery over others. In complex systems, power laws are everywhere and they manifest themselves in civilization.

So the civilization that we live in is deeply kleptocratic, yet it has to be to function. The fact that power laws manifest themselves in civilization isn’t a challenge to reformers; rather, it’s a fact that has to be accepted to live in it. Medieval clerics may have preached that God authorized the kleptocracies around them—and right enough they may have been on that count—but we needn’t have recourse to such rhetoric today, not with our understanding of social evolution. Our civilization, after all, is neither the product of divine command nor a social contract; rather, it has taken the form it has thanks to generations of cultural selection, dependent on a whole menagerie of causes that are historical contingent. Those historical contingencies become crystalized into civilization. To describe the manner in which contingent chance events become integral parts of a functional whole, Stuart A. Kauffman likens the products of evolution to a Rube-Goldberg machine in The Origins of Order:

Beyond the charm of his style, Goldberg’s ad hoc machinery demonstrates a basic principle. Once the components are assembled and once the system works, the system is an integrated whole. Removing or sharply changing any component will probably lead to failure. That is, solutions, once found, are more or less locked in. (Kauffman 1993: 13)

The hierarchies and institutions we have are very much a product of frozen randomness, yet they have become integral to the greater whole of the civilization they are embedded within. To level those hierarchies and institutions in a desire to create a more equal society would be strike at the functional whole that is civilization.

The response to the kleptocracy around us isn’t to return to a simpler society, it’s to reduce the impact of coercion in society and to allow people to carve out their own private spheres of their own making. Abstract rules of conduct, rather than solidarity and encompassing cooperation, are what enable human beings to flourish in a complex society, despite its strongly kleptocratic elements. Commutative justice is foremost among those abstract rules of conduct. Commutative justice enables us to protect ourselves from that kleptocratic world and to follow the path that we desire for ourselves. We have to recognize that virtue begins at home and that our desire to find fulfillment through our wider society is ultimately an impulse that has little role in social existence in a civilization.

10/24/2014

Discourse about method all too often starts from an unfortunate starting point. In such discussions, focus is on metaphysics and epistemology, yet away from view is one of the most important questions facing any theorist: What is their craft? What is their final cause that gives meaning to their efforts? There has to be some reason why they are doing what they are doing, and there has to be some problem which vexes his mind that he seeks a solution to.

Aristotle started from this problem in the very first chapter of The Nicomachean Ethics. There he establishes that every inquiry must have some purpose, some final cause:

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that which all things aim. But a certain difference is found among ends; some are activities, others are products apart from the activities that produce them. Where there are ends apart from the actions, it is the nature of the products to be better than the activities. Now, as there are many actions, arts, sciences, their ends also are many; the end of the medical art is health, that of shipbuilding a vessel, that of strategy victory, that of economics wealth. But where such arts fall under a single capacity—as bridle-making and the other arts concerned with the equipment of horses fall under the art of riding, and this and every military action under strategy, in the same way other arts fall under yet others—in all of these the ends of the master arts are to be preferred to all the subordinate ends; for it is for the sake of the former that the latter are pursued. It makes no difference whether the activities themselves are the ends of the actions, or something else apart from the activities, as in the case of the sciences just mentioned. (Translation by W.D. Ross)

Method is a tool. As a tool, it must fit into the theorist’s craft. If a theorist is studying black holes, for instance, he will deploy different tools than if he is studying, as Georges Cuvier did, the similarity between extant Indian elephants and the Mastodon fossils that were brought to him from Ohio. Metaphysics and epistemology will certainly figure into the picture, but only insofar as they relate to the craft that the theorist practices.

For the craft I’m more familiar with, economics, concern about the craft of economics has certainly motivated my concerns about method. The more and more I think about what the craft of economics is, the less and less I am satisfied with the picture Llionel Robbins gives of it in his Essay on the Nature of Significance of Economic Science. In fact, I have come to think that Robbins actually doesn’t capture the nature of economics as a craft.

Robbins is famous for promulgating the definition of economics as “the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which has alternative uses” in that book. A nice, tidy definition, but one I think doesn’t capture really what I believe the craft of economics is about. Yes, microeconomics and concerns about the tradeoffs present in human behavior are vitally important to the economist’s craft, but they cannot be all that economics offers. After all, the emergent properties of the markets cannot be perceived from the first-person point of view of those within in; instead, economics needs reference to a third-person spectator who can behold the growth and change that happens to the commercial society. Simon Newcomb recognized that in Principles of Political Economy when he discussed how the coordination of society is manifest in its life:

We readily perceive that the system by which the body of farmers on the prairies of the West exchange goods with various countries in Europe, Asia, and South America is exceedingly intricate in its details. Its successful operation depends upon the proper co-ordination of the efforts of manufacturers, merchants, ship-owners, and managers of railways. There being little real concert of action among these widely separated individuals, the co-ordination of their work is a matter of slowly growing habit (Newcomb 2012, 138).

In my own view, the economist’s craft is to understand how the commercial society operates, and how it serves universal benevolence in doing so. That it serves universal benevolence is not a given and obvious fact; instead, the work of economists is necessary to morally legitimate the commercial society, and those who pursue honest profit within it. Daniel Klein puts the policy angle well in Knowledge and Coordination when he writes that “Wisdom in economics resides principally in know-how in explaining that we do not know-how in explaining that we do not know how to intervene in a way conduces to concatenate coordination” (Klein 2012, 250).

Such wisdom cannot come from studying the economy from the point of view of pure economic agents alone; instead, it needs an external spectator, and so the craft of economics must be about appreciating the economic order as a whole.

03/14/2014

I've already written about my own approval of Hannan's grandiose yet surprisingly sensible claim, but don't take it from me alone. Both Daniel Klein and Tyler Cowen have both written about how they think the book is more important than one might expect prima facie.

Like Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism it is a book that I do not always agree with, but which teaches a lot and is quite persuasive in many of its central messages. As wide-frame as Goldberg’s book is, Hannan’s is much much wider. I learned a great deal more from Hannan’s book.

Here is a 10-min interview at the Institute of Economic Affairs (London).

Hannan is clearly a strong proponent of individual liberty and free markets. But some libertarians will object to Hannan. My sense is that Hannan is not really very militaristic (here is a blog post where he says Britain probably should have stayed out of the First World War); he is for at least moderate liberalization of drugs. In the Heritage talk he flatly tells the audience to favor immigration.

Oh how one can mock those subtitles about the making of the modern world, heh heh! Yet this subtitle has a plausible claim to be…true. Even more shockingly, the subtitle accurately describes the book.

Every time my plane lands in England I shed at least a tear, maybe more, out of realization that I am visiting a birthplace (the birthplace?) of liberty. This is not a joke and during my trips there I never quite snap out of that feeling, though I am also well aware of all the problems those people have foisted upon the world as well.

I found many parts of this book to be superficial, or perhaps well-known. Yet often they were superficial and…true. Here is one excerpt:

To put it another way, the distinction was not between Catholic and Protestant individuals, but between Catholic and Protestant states.

Here is from an Amazon review:

"Author Daniel Hannan is a person of English ancestry who was born and raised in Peru then relocated to the United Kingdom as an adult and made a career in politics, including becoming one of the U.K.’s representatives to the European Parliament. His global experience has shown him how unique is our 'Anglosphere' heritage of representative democracy, protection of property rights, the sanctity of law, and the inalienable rights of the individual."

This is in some ways an important book, though I do not think it is a book which will satisfy everybody.

02/21/2014

Daniel Klein has a new article in The Atlantic. "The Origin of 'Liberalism'" which covers the great replication of the use of the word 'liberal' ever since its use by Adam Smith:

Thanks to digitization, we can now establish when the word “liberal” first took on a political meaning. For centuries it had had what scholars have called pre-political meanings, such as generous, tolerant, or suitable to one of noble or superior status—as in “liberal arts” and “liberal education.” But now using Google’s Ngram Viewer we can see what the word “liberal”—as an adjective—was used to modify. Up to 1769 the word was used only in pre-political ways, but in and around 1769 such terms as “liberal policy,” “liberal plan,” “liberal system,” “liberal views,” “liberal ideas,” and “liberal principles” begin sprouting like flowers.

My research with Will Fleming finds that the Scottish historian William Robertson appears to be the most significant innovator, repeatedly using “liberal” in a political way, notably in a book published in 1769. (I presented more details in a lecture at the Ratio Institute, viewable here.) Of the Hanseatic League, for example, Robertson spoke of “the spirit and zeal with which they contended for those liberties and rights,” and how a society of merchants, “attentive only to commercial objects, could not fail of diffusing over Europe new and more liberal ideas concerning justice and order.”

Robertson’s friend and fellow Scot Adam Smith used “liberal” in a similar sense in The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. If all nations, Smith says, were to follow “the liberal system of free exportation and free importation,” then they would be like one great cosmopolitan empire, and famines would be prevented. Then he repeats the phrase: “But very few countries have entirely adopted this liberal system.”

Smith’s “liberal system” was not concerned solely with international trade. He used “liberal” to describe application of the same principles to domestic policy issues. Smith was a great opponent of restrictions in the labor market, favoring freedom of contract, and wished to see labor markets “resting on such liberal principles.”